Chatham Lodging Trust (CLDT) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for standing by. My name is Gail, and I will be your operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome each and every one of you to the third quarter earnings results for Chatham Lodging Trust. All lines will be placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, kindly press star one again. I will now turn the call over to Chris Daly, President of DG Public Relations. Please go ahead.

Chris Daly: Thank you, Gail. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Chatham Lodging Trust Third Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. Please note that many of our comments today are considered forward-looking statements as defined by federal securities laws. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, both known and unknown, as described in our most recent Form 10-K and other SEC filings. All information in this call is as of November 5, 2026, unless otherwise noted, and the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to conform the statement to actual results or changes in the company's expectations. You can find copies of our SEC filings and earnings release, which contain reconciliations to non-GAAP financial measures referred on this call, on our website at chathamlodgingtrust.com. Now, to provide you with some insight into Chatham's 2026 third quarter results, allow me to introduce Jeff Fisher, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Dennis Craven, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Jeremy Wegner, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I am going to turn the session over to Jeff Fisher. Jeff?

Jeff Fisher: Okay. Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. Certainly appreciate all joining us this morning here. Dennis, Jeremy, and I are coming to you from our Homewood Suites in Paducah, Kentucky, after touring all six of our recently acquired hotels over the last couple of days. Let me tell you something, believe it or not, it is pretty exciting to be here. Let us start there. Year-to-date through September, the approximate $100 million portfolio generated excellent results with third quarter RevPAR growth of 10% and GOP margins of 45.4%. Year-to-date through September, RevPAR rose 8% and the GOP margins expanded 140 basis points to 48%. Both metrics outperformed our portfolio in the quarter and year-to-date, which is just fantastic. Demand growth has been approximately 3% in 2026, and that number accelerated in the third quarter to almost 5%. As they enter the seasonably slower months, we look ahead to another good year next year and the full ramp-up of events at the new and recently, actually huge, as we saw yesterday, expanded athletic complexes in Paducah. Pivoting to our overall results, it was another great quarter, stacked on top of an equally strong second quarter and a very good first quarter, with excellent results on the top line margins and flow through to hotel EBITDA and FFO per share. Listen to these third quarter results. RevPAR up 8%, hotel EBITDA margins up 190 basis points, and EBITDA up 21%, with our FFO per share up 31%. We certainly haven't seen that for a while. Combining outstanding operating results with a very accretive acquisition, and while strategically hitting a home run with our share repurchase plan, are each meaningful contributors that have enabled us to easily beat our original expectations for the year. We've increased our original adjusted FFO per share guidance from $1.09 to $1.39 at the midpoint, a 28% increase. Third quarter RevPAR of $161 set an all-time high off the back of record July and September RevPAR. Business travel represents approximately 75% of our EBITDA, and BT demand was the biggest driver of our results. All of the major airlines are seeing the same thing. As American said, corporate travel is up 28%, and with that, small, medium performance up 46%. Delta reported its highest corporate sales week ever during the third quarter, and corporate sales across all sectors up double digit. United said business revenue up 22% in the quarter, and Southwest said third quarter included 20 of the top 50 corporate booking days in history. Obviously, all this is very encouraging for the hotel industry overall, but especially for us, given BT is, as I said, is by far our most important segment. Also, we are continuing to see announcement after announcement of business investment happening around the country, and it is driving BT demand up and down the chain scales. We've seen broad strength across our portfolio, as evidenced by our overall portfolio occupancy of 83% in the quarter, which marks our highest quarterly occupancy since 2019. Additionally, 13 of our 39 hotels produced double-digit RevPAR growth in the quarter. Of course, for us, for years, we were asked by investors and potential investors when Silicon Valley was going to come back to life, and we can affirmatively say it is. RevPAR surged 23% to $174, which is the highest quarterly RevPAR since the pandemic, excluding the intern-heavy third quarter of 2022. RevPAR has been up double digits five of the last six years, and projected 2026 RevPAR growth should be our best growth since the pandemic. This is obviously a great statistic. Third quarter occupancy reached 85% for the hotels, which represents the fourth highest quarterly occupancy in the last decade. As we've previously spoken, once occupancy starts getting above 80%, it allows us to start pushing ADR more aggressively. Depending on how the fourth quarter finishes, we may very well achieve a 10% ADR increase this year, which would be a great way to head into 2027 for those hotels. We are experiencing strong corporate demand in the Valley. All four hotels have seen top account production increases ranging from 22%-29% at our Mountain View and both Sunnyvale hotels, and over 50% increases at our San Mateo hotel. If you look at our growth in the second and third quarters, our hotels actually did better outside of the World Cup games. Our top accounts are filled with names everyone knows, whether it be Applied Materials, Palo Alto Networks, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, SAP, Sony, Roblox, Samsung, Tesla, just to name a few. By the way, Silicon Valley's strength continued in October with RevPAR growth of approximately 18% of occupancy of almost 80%. As we've reiterated, a key component of the Chatham growth story moving forward is the accelerating recovery of these four hotels that will drive outperformance. Silicon Valley added 250 basis points to our third quarter RevPAR growth. Outside of the Valley, among our largest markets, Dallas and Washington D.C. were the best performers, with RevPAR growth of 20% and 15% respectively. As everyone knows, the Dallas Convention Center has been substantially closed for renovation and expansion since 2024, but it still hosts some smaller events, and our performance benefited from some World Cup demand related to the entire media center for the first part of July, and a great job by our team selling the hotel with RevPAR up 34% in the quarter. That was the media center for the World Cup. Of course, performance at our three D.C. hotels thankfully benefited from no shutdowns or threats of shutdowns. Encouragingly, and this applies to all our hotels, government per diem rates for the next year, 2026 to 2027 period, are up on an average over 5% across our portfolio, so that's some good news looking forward. Year-to-date RevPAR at our two Sunnyvale hotels is approximately 18% below 2019 levels still. Mountain View was under renovation this year, so it's not comparable, but it's trending around the same level to 2019. San Mateo is up approximately 8% versus 2019. Returning RevPAR to 2019 levels at the two big Sunnyvale hotels would add another $4 million-$5 million of FFO, or an additional $0.08-$0.10 per share. Before handing the call over to Dennis, I want to emphasize that we are thrilled with our results so far this year. Like I said earlier, it's a combination of great results along with great strategic decisions over the past few years, and thankfully, shareholders have noticed, and our returns lead all lodging REITs in 2026. Having said that, we strongly believe in our ability to further increase shareholder value via multiple levers. As a reminder, the overall lack of new supply in the industry favors existing owners, and combine that with the robust demand growth we are seeing across the board in many of our markets certainly bodes well for 2027 and beyond. Our portfolio will continue to benefit from the continued resurgence of the business traveler, and of course, no other lodging company has the internal growth upside that Chatham does, given our exposure to Silicon Valley and Bellevue. Now, add in the fact that we generate the highest operating margins in the industry, that means our FFO growth potential is very strong, and that is before investing money on any external acquisitions. Finally, we are generating strong cash flow after CapEx and dividends that we can use to accrete FFO, whether that is by paying down debt, making acquisitions, repurchasing shares, or increasing our common dividend. Our balance sheet is in great shape after our successful recycling of assets and paying down debt over the last couple of years. Based on our guidance, we estimate that we will generate $25 million of free cash flow. Let us not forget, our Home2 Suites Portland will deliver accretive earnings upon its opening in 2028. We look forward to executing on these many levers that we do have and delivering for our shareholders going forward. With that, I would like to turn it over to Dennis.

Dennis Craven: Thanks, Jeff. We continue to experience broad demand growth across our portfolio, with approximately 85% of our hotels generating RevPAR growth and 80% of our hotels pushing ADRs higher. As Jeff stated, one-third of our hotels experiencing double-digit RevPAR gains. These trends are even better than the strong trends we saw in both of the first two quarters. Our top five RevPAR hotels in the quarter were led by our Hampton Portland with RevPAR of $350, essentially flat to last year, an incredible $120 higher than our second-highest hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn Portsmouth, with RevPAR of $230. Rounding out our top five were the Hilton Garden Inn Marina del Rey with RevPAR of $225, our Residence Inn in White Plains, New York, with RevPAR of $206, and then the Residence Inn Mountain View, producing great results following its renovation. We had little exposure to the World Cup in the third quarter, benefiting only slightly from one game at Levi's Stadium and one at SoFi Stadium, as well as the media center in Dallas that Jeff spoke about. Our seven predominant leisure hotels generated RevPAR growth of approximately 1% in the quarter. Our leisure hotels were led by our Hyatt Place Pittsburgh, which saw RevPAR grow 17%. On the downside, our Savannah SpringHill Suites cooled off slightly, down 4% in the quarter, with that market softening after being really on fire for the last several years. Our Hilton Garden Inn Portsmouth saw RevPAR decline 6% in the quarter due to leisure demand softness from Canada and a new Homewood Suites that opened earlier this year just down the block. Our five convention hotels saw RevPAR expand 15% in the quarter. Dallas and Austin had rebound quarters with RevPAR up 34% and 20% respectively, gaining business even though their respective convention centers are essentially closed. Austin also benefited from an increased business travel from key corporate accounts in The Domain where both of our hotels are located. Another nice development occurred in San Antonio with our hotel up there 21% in the quarter. Outside of our larger markets, we had another great quarter at our two hotels outside of Charleston in Summerville, where RevPAR grew 10%, and our Home2 Phoenix Downtown experienced RevPAR gains of 13% in the quarter. Switching to our bottom line successes, we had another great quarter managing expenses and maximizing employee productivity, as well as increasing our out-of-room profits, which ultimately are driving our margins higher. We continue to focus on increasing other operating department revenue and profits, and we were able to increase those profits by about $700,000 or 23% in the quarter from $3.2 million to $3.9 million. Within our other operating departments, we increased parking profit by $260,000 or 12% and doubled our cancellation fees to almost $500,000 due to increased focus on collecting and also benefiting from the power of implementations which automated cancellation fee collections. We even increased our pantry profits by 10% in the quarter. Just a fantastic job by our teams focusing on these profit enhancement initiatives. Our employee productivity remains excellent. We maintained a steady level of employment versus the end of the second quarter. It was actually down four employees, and that's a nice achievement even though portfolio occupancy rose to 83% from 81% from the second quarter to the third quarter. For the quarter, our labor and benefits cost per occupied room increased 2.9%, thus allowing us to meaningfully expand our operating margins. Outside of labor and benefits, we were able to drive margins higher by reducing our repairs and maintenance, our utilities, our property taxes, and our property insurance line items all by approximately 30 basis points each. Again, should be some good news coming on the property insurance renewal upcoming for 2027, with expectations of a further reduction of 8%-10% expected at this point. For us, it's not big dollars, and it's probably only a decrease of probably around a few hundred thousand dollars, but nonetheless, great to see and will help offset what seems to be never-ending increases in healthcare costs and employee-related liability insurance. For the quarter, our top five producers of GOP were led by the little old Hampton Inn Portland with GOP of $2.4 million, just another fantastic quarter, followed by our Residence Inn San Diego, and then three of our five tech hotels, our Residence Inn Bellevue, our two Sunnyvale hotels rounding out the top five. When you include Mountain View and San Mateo, all four Silicon Valley hotels were in the top 11 of our 39 hotels. If you look at hotel EBITDA, really the only difference in the top five is that our Embassy Suites Springfield bested our first Sunnyvale, our Sunnyvale number one hotel to reach in the top five. Looking further at the Silicon Valley hotels, third quarter GOP was up 39%, and hotel EBITDA grew 51% year-over-year on a 23% increase in RevPAR. Our third quarter GOP margins were approximately 50%, up 500 basis points, and our hotel EBITDA margins of almost 43% rose 740 basis points. We did receive about $100,000 of property tax refunds in the quarter on one of our hotels in Sunnyvale, which added about 80 basis points to that margin, but still excluding that, 660 basis points of hotel EBITDA margin improvement. We discussed last quarter that we most likely looked opportunistically sell an asset or two this year. We do have one hotel currently under contract for approximately $11.5 million that would close before the end of the year if it is completed. On the CapEx front, we spent approximately $3 million in the quarter and $17 million year to date, with our full budget for the year being about $27 million. We do have three hotels scheduled for renovation later this year, which are our Residence Inn San Diego Gaslamp, our Homewood Suites Farmington, and our Hyatt Place Pittsburgh will commence its renovation, most likely now in early January, given the fact that the Steelers at least look to be making the playoffs at the moment. I'll turn it over to Jeremy.

Jeremy Wegner: Thanks, Dennis. Good morning, everyone. Our Q3 2026 hotel EBITDA was $35 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $31.9 million, and adjusted FFO was $0.46 per share. We were able to generate a GOP margin of 44.7% and hotel EBITDA margin of 38.7% in Q3. GOP margins for the quarter were up 110 basis points from last year, and hotel EBITDA margins increased 190 basis points. The Midwest portfolio that we acquired in March generated RevPAR growth of 9.8% and $3 million of hotel EBITDA in Q3. Chatham's overall RevPAR growth of 8.3% in Q3 exceeded our expectations going into the quarter, and the strong top-line performance has continued into October, where Chatham's RevPAR increased 7.9%. While Chatham's top-line performance was strong across many markets, performance was strongest in Silicon Valley, where RevPAR increased 23% in the quarter. Costs continue to remain manageable, with rooms labor up just under 3% on a cost per occupied room basis in Q3. Chatham's balance sheet remains in excellent condition and provides significant flexibility to fund opportunistic growth through accretive acquisitions and the development of the Home2 Suites Portland. As of Q3, Chatham's leverage ratio, as defined in its credit facility, was only 29.3%, and the company had $235 million of availability under its revolving credit facility. Continuing strong EBITDA growth and meaningful free cash flow after dividends are expected to further enhance our financial flexibility. In 2026, we expect to generate approximately $25 million of free cash flow after dividends and maintenance and renovation capital expenditures. With this level of free cash flow, Chatham will be able to fund the development of the Home2 Suites Portland with virtually no incremental borrowing. Turning to our full year guidance for 2026, we expect RevPAR growth of 4%-4.5%, adjusted EBITDA of $104.2 million-$105.3 million, and adjusted FFO per share of $1.38-$1.40 for the full year. We generally expect that Chatham's Q4 RevPAR growth will be approximately 3.5%-4%. This concludes my portion of the call. Operator, please open the line for questions.

Operator: At this time, I would like to remind everyone that if you have a question, press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. Okay, your first question comes from the line of Gaurav Mehta with Alliance Global Partners. Your line is open.

Gaurav Mehta: Thank you. Good morning. I wanted to ask you on your Silicon Valley hotels, maybe on the occupancy side, what's the upside left on the occupancy side? Is there like a natural cap on the occupancy? And then, how does the occupancy for your Silicon Valley hotel compare to the market occupancy in Silicon Valley?

Dennis Craven: Hey, Gaurav, this is Dennis. I mean, listen, I think if you look at upside, and I don't have the full year quantified for you, but if you go back to pre-pandemic years, the Silicon Valley hotels ran upwards of 80s and into the 90s in terms of occupancy, especially in the second and third quarters. Then seasonally, those hotels slow down from kind of mid-November to mid-February. So there's still a lot of upside in total occupancy levels. I think when you looked at our third quarter occupancy of almost, I guess it was 85%, there's still room to run there.

Gaurav Mehta: Okay. Second question on the expense side, it seems like your expense growth in the quarter was 2.5%. Can you maybe provide some color on how you managed to keep the expenses lower in the quarter?

Dennis Craven: Yeah, I mean, Gaurav Mehta, this is something really we've and I'll give kudos to Island Hospitality. We don't like giving them too many compliments here and there sometimes. But really over the last few years, they've invested a lot of resources and people especially, that are really looking at trends and patterns every day of the week and staying in constant communication with the GMs and the regional VPs, just ensuring that they are adjusting their expense patterns, their buying, their labor most importantly, in terms of hours, on a very frequent basis. And it's just those controls that allow us to really keep a handle on, especially employee productivity.

Gaurav Mehta: All right. Thank you. That's all I had.

Dennis Craven: Thank you, Gaurav Mehta.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Tyler Batory with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Tyler Batory: Thanks. Good morning. Congrats on the really strong results here. The performance-

Dennis Craven: Thanks, Tyler.

Tyler Batory: has been tremendous. So really well done. I don't want to lose the forest through the trees with this first question, but I am curious a little bit more just what you're seeing the rest of Q4, just in terms of trying to bridge the RevPAR performance so far this year, the RevPAR performance through October in particular, and then November, December, and how those are shaping up. I know the holiday kind of complicates things, and it's seasonally slow. But just wanted to be sure or be clear in terms of what you're seeing to end the year.

Dennis Craven: Yeah, I think, Tyler, we're similar to what we've done each of the first three quarters. I think November and December for us, generally speaking, is kind of lower single-digit RevPAR growth implied. We'd like to think that we're going to beat that, so we're a little bit conservative on that front. We do have, obviously, one of our bigger hotels, the Residence Inn San Diego Gaslamp, has started its renovation. Thankfully, it's kind of been in a year where the convention calendar is a little bit down, so timing is a little helpful to us. But I think in general, we're going to be a little conservative here for November, December. One thing we do know, even though it's always a comp year-over-year, is that obviously the four Silicon Valley hotels, which have been just fantastic, people do start to check out there as you get into the Thanksgiving holidays, and a lot of those people just really don't come back until after the first of the year and really into February, late January and early February. So, we're just going to be a little bit conservative here, and hopefully we outperform it.

Tyler Batory: Okay. That's what I figured, but just wanted to check. Then a multi-part question thinking about 2027. I know visibility, still got a ways to go till we get to 2027, but I imagine you're doing budgets and planning for next year. In terms of the industry and the lodging industry overall, I mean, again, the performance this year has been exceptional, and I just wonder if that has legs into next year. Do we start to run into challenging comps and maybe things start to slow? If you could talk about just your industry perspective, that would be helpful. Then specific to Chatham, just frame for us some of the building blocks, renovations, possible disruption, possible outperformance next year. Really just trying to get a baseline of generally how you're thinking about the industry, and then in light of that outlook, how you're positioned to potentially outperform that industry perspective.

Jeff Fisher: Well, that's a lot of questions. This is Jeff. Not sure we can remember all that, but we'll try, okay? Relative to 2027, look, I will tell you, because we try to tell it like it is, that some of the outperformance this year, obviously in the industry, has to be attributed to some of the real crappy results the prior year. Some of those external factors, whether they were a couple of government shutdowns and some of the other things that occurred overall in the macro geopolitical scene. You do have a scenario that, on that front, that doesn't repeat itself in 2027. That being said, I think the underlying strength that everybody is seeing in the business travel segment, which is where we are, as I've said during the prepared comments and otherwise, when you look at the composition of our portfolio, really bodes well for us for next year. Look, they can vote to shut down as many data centers as they want to shut down in the future, but I still believe that Silicon Valley has plenty of legs left in it for the work that is going on and for the overall expansion in that segment. I think that with one-third of the portfolio, or hopefully getting back to that number for our total EBITDA, would be very accretive, as we indicated, around $0.10 or more in FFO on top of where we are. I think I could turn it back over to Dennis to talk about any specific drivers per se going forward.

Dennis Craven: Yeah, Tyler. I mean, listen, I think, I don't know if you happened to catch, but Chris Nassetta was on CNBC this morning. He spoke, one of his statistics was talking about non-residential fixed investments, NRFI, not exactly no runs, first inning gambling bets, but basically saying that it's at its strongest point in decades. I think one of the things we've talked about here for a good year and a half or so is the fact that just with all this capital investment, whether that was from the prior administration with the Infrastructure Act and now what's happened in the last two years, there is just a lot of money being spent on manufacturing and other types of things as well around the country. As we sit here in Paducah, Kentucky, after going to Effingham yesterday and Joplin, all six of our hotels basically had the same thing, which is Monday to Thursday, they are 100% sold out at this stage of that thing. There is a lot of activity happening in a lot of these investment areas that are very encouraging, especially for Chatham, and given its reliance on one, obviously, our tech hub in Silicon Valley, but also just in general, our exposure around kind of the Midwest and the Southeast, which where a lot of this capital investment is happening. I think in general, that is really where it is that is going to be very good for our hotels.

Jeff Fisher: Look, with 66% of the hotels being extended stay hotels, let us not forget the benefit that brings, because you could see that kind of business that Dennis is talking about in a lot of the locations really is more than one-night, two-night business. The length of stay, I think, is important. Those statistics, I think, over as you move through the next couple of years, and I noticed that extended stay hotels again outpaced non-extended stay hotels in a recent report by The Highland Group very substantially, and that gap should continue to grow, in my opinion. Bodes well for all our Homewood Suites, Residence Inns, our Home2s, those kind of hotels.

Dennis Craven: Lastly, Tyler, you did mention kind of renovation schedules and everything like that. As you move into 2027 and the years after that, we are pretty well lined up here to where it is essentially going to be kind of around five hotels per year that will be getting renovated over the next several years. We have the big Residence Inn San Diego Gaslamp Hotel start. Well, now it has commenced that renovation. If you look forward a year, fourth quarter of next year, kind of from the November to February timeframe, we will be renovating one of our Sunnyvale hotels. The following year after that, we will be renovating the second of the Sunnyvale hotels, and after that, the San Mateo hotel. Those are pretty well lined up, at least from a comp perspective, Tyler, that we are not going to be taking some of multiple of our biggest hotels out at the same time. It really should have a normalized effect when you look at our comp RevPAR.

Jeff Fisher: Just to footnote that, I think you get a lot of ADR growth out of those renovations, particularly in Silicon Valley.

Dennis Craven: Yeah, and we haven't spent a lot of time talking about it, but we will in the near future, which is a lot of the improvements we're going to be making to all four of those hotels outside of the guest rooms. That's really exciting in terms of adding some stuff to the hotels and really nice fitness facilities and other facilities, and really enhancing the outdoor spaces and public space of those gatehouses, really to bring those up to experiences that today's traveler that's really going to like. So, we're excited about that.

Tyler Batory: Okay. A lot of good detail there, so appreciate it, and I think you hit on all my questions. So, I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Jeff Fisher: All right. Okay, we're not getting senile yet anyway. That's good news.

Operator: All right. At this time, I would just like to announce one final reminder. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Ladies and gentlemen, since there are no further questions, I would like to hand the call over back to you for the closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Jeff Fisher: Well, thank you all for joining today, for those of you that are there or listen later on. We certainly look forward to maintaining our momentum, our focus, and I think the results will speak for themselves going forward. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you, everyone, and that concludes today's call. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day ahead. Thank you.